Berlin Review: ‘Joan Baez I Am A Noise’

Hoda Kotb has faith in her co-hosts and friends,Jenna Bush Hager and Savannah Guthrie, when it comes to finding her a man. On Thursday's episode of, the trio were discussing a story where a mother set her daughter up for a date.The conversation quickly turned to the hosts as they asked each other if they would let their parents pre-screen dates before meeting them.

Jenna Bush Hager partied hard in New York City with some of her Today Show cohosts on Thursday evening, but one star was missing.The Today with Hoda and Jenna star was joined by her friends and colleagues Savannah Guthrie, Dylan Dreyer and Sheinelle Jones as they celebrated the fourth anniversary of her book club, Read with Jenna. However, there was no sign of her close friend Hoda Kotb, presumably as she still prioritizes time with her family after a health scare involving her daughter.See how the Today Show marked the occasion of Jenna's book club's fourth birthday while Hoda was away last week in the video below.WATCH: Today celebrates Read with Jenna live on airReturning to the 41-year-old's celebration on Thursday evening, she and her friends were joined by numerous other authors, stars and friends at the party.

Jenna Bush Hager couldn't help but get emotional when discussing her friend and co-anchor, Hoda Kotb's return to .ET spoke with Hager at her book club party to commemorate the four-year anniversary of her  book club series, , where she shared how much Kotb's absence was felt on the show.«Hoda, makes my life full,» Hager gushed. «And it's so interesting, but you don't really know until somebody's kind of gone, unexpectedly, how much you depend on them.»«I mean, I knew I adored her, but I wrote her when she came back and I said, 'I don't even know if you know, how much you impact my life,'» she added, before getting emotional. Kotb has been on quite the emotional journey herself the last few weeks as her 3-year-old daughter, Hope, was hospitalized after spending several days in the ICU.With Hager having three children herself, the TV personality said it puts things in perspective.«I think she said it best.

John Boyega will star in the next film from “Dead Pigs” and “Birds of Prey” director Cathy Yan. The sci-fi romance “The Freshening” comes from FilmNation Entertainment with Ali Wong producing alongside Hyperobject Industries’ Adam McKay and Betsy Koch and Rewild’s Yan and Ash SarohiaThe picture, set to film later this year, is inspired by Rachel Khong’s short story in the Paris Review, which was set in the near future during which tensions over race and gender have reached a violent boiling point.

EXCLUSIVE: John Boyega has been set to star in sci-fi romance The Freshening from director Cathy Yan (Birds Of Prey), we can reveal.

Hoda Kotb's time away from the Today Show is seemingly coming to an end soon, according to her co-star Jenna Bush Hager.The former is going on almost two weeks of being off from the popular morning show, her last appearance was a pre-taped President's Day show on Monday, February 21st.After fans kept urging for an answer on her whereabouts, on Wednesday Craig Melvin revealed a "family health matter" was behind Hoda's absence, and now her 4th Hour co-star has given another, hopeful, update.WATCH: Hoda Kotb reveals daughter's reaction to becoming a big sisterMORE: All we know about Hoda Kotb's Today Show replacement, Tom LlamasAs Jenna walked on stage for March 2nd's installment of 4th Hour with Hoda and Jenna, she walked out next to Hoda's occasional replacement, Willie Geist, who typically hosts Sunday Today.As she made her way towards her usual spot on the news desk, she announced: "We have Willie, he is in for Hoda, who will be back very, very soon," she promised.MORE: Today Show star Hoda Kotb reveals true opinion on Prince HarryShe went on to praise her temporary co-host for adapting to his new role so seamlessly, telling him: "Can I just say, because you've been here for the last two weeks off and on, your range, going from Morning Joe, to here…" getting a prompt round of applause from the crew working behind the scenes.A post shared by TODAY (@todayshow)Hoda's co-star gave a long-awaited update on Wednesday"It's just really incredible," Jenna added, and Willie praised the show in return, telling her: "This show is a breath of fresh air, I love it here."DISCOVER: T.J.

Showing her support. Jenna Bush Hager gave a sweet shout-out to her Today coanchor Hoda Kotb amid the journalist’s continued absence from the morning show.

With the delicacy of a bee probing a flower for pollen, Basque director Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren picks her way through the tensions and dilemmas within a family where the youngest member, an 8-year-old boy called Aitor, is feeling his way toward a new identity as a girl. Sofia Otero, who deservedly won the Silver Bear for a lead performer at the Berlinale’s award night Saturday, shows an instinctive, unforced and generous understanding of how difficult her character’s life must be. As Coco – the between-stools nickname the family has devised to avoid anything too specifically gendered – Otero is alternately obstinate, tearful, mischievous and withdrawn. She craves her mother’s comprehension but pushes her away when she tries to talk to her about why she doesn’t want to go to school.  

Christoph Hochhäusler’s slow-burn urban noir Till the End of the Night starts with time-lapse footage of the film’s first set, a well-to-do and apparently lived-in apartment flat, being built from scratch out of an empty room. Sadly, what looks to be challenging piece of Brechtian deconstruction is literally a plot point, as well as a not-so-subtle metaphor for the layers of deceit in the story that follows.

Odd people turn up in deserts. People are also inclined to disappear. A strange moonscape of opal prospectors’ digs and slurry heaps helps to set a bleak mood in Australian filmmaker Ivan Sen’s Limbo, shot in gently faded black and white in the South Australian mining town of Coober Pedy, repurposed here as Limbo. Limbo, says the preacher whose radio show seems to be the only thing available on the local airwaves, is the edge of hell. Here, unpurged sinners may be “in friendship with God.” Damnation, however, isn’t far away.

Donna Summer could hit notes more thrillingly beautiful than any other pop singer of her time, or since. I’m not sure even Whitney Houston, as great as she was, quite reached the glistening heights that culminate “Last Dance” (though she comes very close in “I Will Always Love You”). Mariah Carey (no relation to me) performs impressive vocal acrobatics, yet to my ear she can’t match the bell-like shimmer of Donna in the higher registers. And Donna in the lower registers – well, the voice thrums with visceral resonance.

There’s a pretty traditional formula that most music documentaries follow. They’ll often center around a standard birth to mainstream success overview, populated with talking heads and contemporaries to contextualize the music, politics, and social scenes.

What do a Belarusian emigrant and an African freedom fighter have in common? It’s a question that Giacomo Abbruzzese’s feature debut, which had its world premiere in Competition at the Berlin Film Festival, answers in a beguilingly magic-realist and digressive way that sort of adds up, even though it requires a lot of good faith from the viewer to make it do so. To illustrate its strangeness, Disco Boy could be loosely described as a mash-up of Beau Travail and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, two very different movies. While both are firmly anchored in arthouse history, neither resembles the other, and it’s that contrast—the rich potential opened up by the space in between—that’s in play here.

Willem Dafoe gets a dream role with Inside, a combo of art film in more ways than one, psychological thriller, heist movie, and survival tale all rolled into one in which Dafoe’s Nemo is center stage, alone, the entire time.

War is coming in Guy Nattiv’s Golda, onscreen and off. But despite the media’s best efforts to turn the casting of British, non-Jewish actor Helen Mirren as Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir into an explosive example of cultural appropriation, both Nattiv’s direction and Mirren’s performance are low-key and careful enough to rise above the controversy. In retrospect, it does seem a little strange that no other candidate was deemed suitable, and the movie won’t do much extra business on account of Mirren’s star power, but those anticipating a tone-deaf disaster will be sorely disappointed.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic For the last 60 years, it’s been hard to see Joan Baez as anything other than a saintly figure, or certainly, at the least, a beatifically placid one. Early on in the new documentary “Joan Baez I Am a Noise,” over shots of its subject being swarmed by fans at the height of her early-‘60s success, the present-day Baez quips that much of the public came to view her like the Virgin Mary — and confesses that, with her head swelled by fame at the time, she was not much inclined to disagree. But occasional flashes of ego seem like the least of the psychological problems dogging the singer, as portrayed in a music doc that starts out as a fly-on-the-wall view of Baez’s farewell tour and ends as an extended look at family trauma and recovery from mental illness.

Femme, a queer thriller written and directed by Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choo Ping, had its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival and stars George Mackay and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett. The film explores the price of vengeance, the toll it can take on the psyche, and how that pressure can lead to some questionable decisions that may leave the viewer looking for explanations for these character’s actions.

For almost four years of siege in the 1990s, the city of Sarajevo concussed from shelling, the rumblings of armored vehicles and the repeated pop of sniper fire.

“They treat you like a movie star,” says an admirer to Ingeborg Bachmann at one of her celebrated readings. She smiles graciously and agrees, thus establishing the baseline for her story.

Most big Korean action movies are backloaded, wrapping up with three to five endings, but Byun Sung-hyun’s Kill Boksoon, which premiered as a Berlinale Special, has everything going on up front. So much so that it initially seems too much, to the extent that it sometimes feels as though there’s actually a mini-series in there bursting to get out. Surprisingly, that’s not such a crazy idea, since, once you get past the far-fetched premise—an underground network of professional contract killers, presided over the glossy conglomerate MK Ent—there’s a lot of rich character work to supplement the superbly choregraphed violence that we’ve come to expect from the region.